The new Vikings of the Middle East

When human beings are having their heads hacked off or being burned alive, it may seem unbalanced to get too upset by seeing some ancient artefacts gleefully smashed up.

Yet whether we are talking about the destruction of stained glass and icons in Tudor England, or the sledgehammer attacks on Mosul’s museum by the so-called Islamic State, we and future generations are all diminished by the loss of our collective cultural heritage.

In the former case, you can argue that it all turned out for the best, though only if you take a positive view of British history for the 400 years after Henry VIII: Protestantism, the great country houses, the industrial revolution, Empire and all.

You don’t have to be a Green voter to feel a doubt or two about some of that. Even the greatest enthusiast for what England became surely cannot suppress a sense of loss as they walk through a ruined abbey, and reflect on the great libraries that were destroyed and treasures melted down.

Not to mention the wholesale disruption of the established order for education, social care and charitable giving.

It is hard to feel any more positive about current events in the Middle East than the dispossessed monks and friars must have felt in the 1530s.

Someone came up with the hopeful line that only replica plaster casts had been destroyed in Mosul, with the originals safe in the British Museum. Sadly it turned out not to be true. Does it matter?

Many years ago I took part in a “balloon debate” with a difference, where the choice was between saving a human life or a great work of art. Being a bit of a misanthrope, I naturally went for the art. I lost heavily. The prevailing view was that each life is unique and irreplaceable, while art may be made again.

The trouble is that IS seems to have equally little regard for either art or life, beauty or humanity.

Perhaps it is another sign of my lack of balance, but I am infuriated by the on-going debate about who “radicalised” the man we used to know as “Jihadi John”.

Richard Cobden and John Bright in the 19th century were radicals. So were Nye Bevan and Margaret Thatcher, from profoundly different standpoints, in the 20th.

An image discouragingly obtained by Googling "British radicals"

What we are witnessing in 21st century jihad is the work of people who may properly be described as zealots or fanatics, or simply thugs and murderers.

They do not deserve the word “radical”. Unless we want to start describing the Viking raid on Lindisfarne in 793 as “a radical day trip”. From which it is but another short step to sympathising with the attackers as troubled souls for whom murder and pillage were really “a cry for help”.

"They were only having a bit of fun"

I have been astonished by the hours the BBC has devoted to the saga of the three teenage girls who decamped to join IS in Syria, trying to pin responsibility on their school, the police or the security services for allowing it to happen.

No matter how “impressionable” they may have been, they surely cannot have been ignorant of the sort of organisation they have gone to join. Yes, we should try to stop it recruiting in the UK, but the absolute priority for public protection must be to prevent those who have left the country and absorbed its ideology from returning.

While the urge to retaliate against atrocities is natural, doing so would ultimately reduce us to the same level as the perpetrators. So we must try to rise above this new Dark Age and hope that, in time, sanity will prevail.

History handily lends a sense of perspective. The Vikings ultimately settled down and became Christians and farmers, and some of us in the North East have their blood in our veins.

The first place that Vikings actually set up home in England, though, was the Isle of Thanet in Kent. The very place that Nigel Farage is hoping to capture for UKIP for this year’s General Election.

I cannot help wondering whether this is a random coincidence or the result of the locals having a very long memory indeed about the dangers of uncontrolled immigration.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

When cartoons become reality

Two mainstays of newspaper cartoon pages used to be a forlorn bloke stranded on a desert island slightly larger than a postage stamp, and a caveman imaginatively called Ugg.

When he wasn’t busy hilariously inventing the wheel Ugg used to go on the pull by whacking a woman over the head with a large club, then dragging her home by her hair.

Happily it’s been a few decades since we stopped seeing the funny side of violence against women, even in a cartoon Stone Age. But one possibility we surely never considered was that impressionable young women might look at the images and think, “Hmm, that Ugg looks just the guy for me!”

Because, to be honest, I can see little difference between his treatment of women and that awaiting “jihadi brides” in Syria, which is apparently proving such a potent draw for teenagers from Bethnal Green.

Our mistake – and it is one of which I have been guilty myself – is believing in progress. In imagining that we only need to have the one holocaust, because humanity will absorb the lesson and draw a simple line: “Never again.”

How many times?

We only have to look at recent events in Paris and Copenhagen, and the horrors unfolding across the Middle East, to see that this is total rubbish. And there’s no point wringing our hands saying “something must be done” because it was the impulse for outsiders to do something that created much of the mess in the first place.

Interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya have all managed to make bad situations worse, as cynical observers warned they would.

Similarly in Ukraine, we thought that the urge to conquer territory to place compatriots under our flag had gone out with Hitler, Sudetenland and the Austrian Anschluss.

Hitler enters the Sudetenland, 1938

We won the Cold War, the Berlin Wall came down, the USSR was dismantled and we could all look forward to a new era of peace, prosperity and liberal democracy.

Talk of “the end of history” looks particularly laughable a quarter century on, as we watch President Putin expertly playing the old, old game.

Still, it could be worse. As of 1991 Ukraine had the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world, inherited from the Soviet Union. It gave up that armoury in return for guarantees from Russia, the USA and Britain, in the Budapest Memorandum of December 1994, “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.”

That’s worked well for them, hasn’t it? Hands up all those who think that Russia would still have annexed Crimea and be fomenting rebellion elsewhere in Ukraine if there had been the remotest chance of starting a nuclear war.

Disarmament always looks like an easy way to save money, and in the long run turns out to cost a fortune in blood as well as treasure. Anyone tempted to vote for the Green or SNP anti-Trident agendas might like to ponder on the lessons from Ukraine before marking their ballot paper.

It does not matter whether the threat comes from old-style 20th century dictators or the adherents to some twisted religion bursting out of a nightmare version of the Middle Ages. The key to security must be having robust border controls and the resources to defend ourselves if the would-be attackers of shopping centres and synagogues make it onto our streets.

The first duty of any government is to protect its citizens and, in the current climate, it would surely do well to think of that in terms of beefing up the Army, Navy and Air Force rather than fretting about people’s waistlines and smoking habits.

The words of Theodore Roosevelt, “Speak softly, and carry a large stick”, should be engraved on a plaque and screwed to the wall in full view of the Prime Minister’s desk.

Meanwhile, as the General Election campaign descends into bathos, with former Foreign Secretaries falling for a sting that surely even Ugg the caveman would have seen through, it’s hard not feel a yearning for that other cartoon idyll.

That tiny desert island with the solitary palm tree would suit me very nicely, at least until the next round of coalition negotiations is well out of the way.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Awed by the sheer randomness of existence

It seems that the most dangerous age for rock stars is 27. While for baby boomers like me, born in 1954, 57 is starting to look less like an English summer pasture, filled with gorgeous wildflowers, and more like a tropical swamp infested with mosquitoes and crocodiles, and surrounded by heavily armed fanatics.

In the last few weeks I have learned of the deaths of three of my school contemporaries, all from natural causes rather than as the result of some freak accident. They were not friends of mine, but with my elephantine memory I naturally remember them well. And in my mind they are still smiling miniatures in blazers and short trousers, full of life and promise.

I really must learn how to scan those black and white form photographs from the 1960s ...

None of them, curiously, was the sort of overweight and physically inferior specimen that one might have marked down for an early exit. In my class, that was undoubtedly me. The fat kid squatting glumly on the floor of the gymnasium as his schoolfellows swarmed nimbly to the top of the ropes. The one who always landed on the near end of the vaulting horse with a groin-shattering crunch, and who somehow endured eight years of swimming classes without ever learning to swim a stroke.

No, these were normally proportioned, fit and healthy lads who should have been actuarially good for whatever average life expectancy is these days (and remember that it will have increased by three hours in the day that has passed between my writing these words and your reading them).

Yet they are gone and I am somehow still here. Which is handy given that, after an apparently rather precocious start, I somehow lapsed into a state of lazily suspended animation for about four decades, and have only recently emerged from my chrysalis as one of the world’s ultimate late developers.

Here I am slowly and rather reluctantly learning the rudiments of parenting at an age when most people are indulging their grandchildren (or, in less privileged postcodes, great grandchildren). And being told by my headshaking financial adviser what a great pity it is that I did not have the foresight to take out a whacking great life insurance policy before I was known to have a heart condition, albeit at a time of my life when I had no dependants and could see no earthly use for such provision.

The dreadful news of this last weekend powerfully underlines the complete randomness of existence and the utter folly of attempting to discern patterns or draw conclusions from it. Alerted by Twitter to the unfolding catastrophe in Norway, I turned on the BBC news channel where an American “expert” banged on at inordinate length about how the attacks bore all the classic hallmarks of being planned and perpetrated by jihadists.

Even when it was pointed out to him that all the reports spoke of a blond-haired, blue-eyed gunman, his confidence did not skip a beat. Surely his interviewer was aware of the increasing sophistication of these organisations in recruiting individuals who were less likely to arouse suspicion?

The idea that this might be the dastardly work of some home-grown loon simply never occurred to him, any more than I anticipated my late fatherhood or the premature departure of the boys I grew up with.

It is very hard to draw any useful conclusions from all this, other than that the one thing in this life on which we can bet with confidence is its complete unpredictability. But I shall make these admittedly unoriginal resolutions: to enjoy life while I can, and try living every day on the assumption that it will be my last. With any luck it won’t be, but it might make me behave more kindly to the people I meet along the way, and that can never be a bad thing for any of us.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.